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Businesses today are seeking for savvy solutions to manage specific functions. In terms of managing their finances, merchant service companies and investment banking firms need low cost solutions in terms of processing and organizing a large amount of data.

These activities can be properly handled by competent B2B financial services firms. But they too face a separate dilemma of selling their offers to the right decision-makers. Lead generation tools are essential in this sense, but modern marketing demands the use of social media platforms.

It might sound strange to you as a solutions-provider for the world of financial services. Social media after all is the least favorable communication channel for audience nurturing. But recent studies point out sites like LinkedIn supply a high traffic of B2B financial leads. This is supported by the 91 percent of marketers.

Along with lead generation telemarketing activities, social media marketing can be utilized to enhance audience engagement experiences and provide a good flow of revenue for your organization.

If you are certain that social media is profitable, you might want to consider these tips for effectively promoting your brand of financial services via online platforms.

Leverage your identity.

The identity of your organization as well as the products that it sells speaks a lot about your position within the industry. Dig deeper and find compelling information about your products which you can leverage for brand awareness.

Diversify your content.

Being complacent with blog articles in your content marketing could not get you anywhere. Although, blog articles are effective informational materials, they lack the ability of visual content in terms of driving up web traffic. It is thus essential to have a diverse combination of both written and visual content for a well-balanced B2B campaign.

Promote your offers.

Do you have an idea in mind? Perhaps, about a promo that could improve your partners’ financial experiences? If you have such an idea in mind, then feel free to execute it via your social media accounts, particularly Twitter and Google Plus. Prior to this, however, it is important to make sure the idea sits well with the SMART framework.

Create and curate.

Content curation is a great way to search for better ideas to enhance your marketing strategies. Taking cues from shareable content featured in Storify, you can have a better view of what the whole financial services sector is talking about. As a result, you can provide clear-cut lead generation strategies focusing on the appropriate decision-makers.

To say that social media does not do much for financial solutions providers is an understatement. It can in fact pose higher conversion rates when it is entrusted to a competent lead generation and appointment setting company that knows the financial industry at the back of its hand.

Social media marketing, or SMM, is perhaps the best method to get one’s marketing message through. Both B2C and B2B companies are making it an essential part of their appointment setting and lead generation program.

And given several conditions such as the prevalence of digital channels and innovations in mobile technology, SMM has become a necessity for business survival. So much so that companies are spending a great deal in optimizing and creating their SMM platforms.

A report from the Wall Street Journal has found that SMM spending will experience a steady upsurge next year. Quoting a recent research paper from Duke University, the report says that spending will increase at least 11% in 2015 and 21% in the next five years. The report also states that expenditures in traditional advertising would “contract” by 3.6%.

It’s obvious. Digital marketing methods are slowly taking the place of television, radio and newspapers in terms of stimulating brand awareness. But can we see this as a positive development?

It might seem inevitable that SMM would supersede traditional advertising, but we cannot ignore its negative implications. Certain factors need to be taken into account before a social media lead generation campaign is realized.

ROI tracking.

The most compelling challenge to SMM is tracking its impact on one’s sales pipeline. The same Duke University report says that only15% of marketers can effectively measure their SMM campaign through quantitative approaches. Furthermore, only40% were able to gauge their campaigns based on qualitative rubrics. The reasons are numerous as they are complex: fluctuating marketing trends, shifting buyer behaviors and preferences, big data management, etc.

Spending on infrastructure.

Despite such projections however, analysts still see a rise in SMM budgets. A bulk of this will be dedicated to establishing vital lead management infrastructure. Spending in this instance will go to much needed upgrades and installing marketing automation software. Despite these activities however, marketers will still encounter the problem of ROI tracking. Unless an effective approach to this issue is realized, marketers will have to bear with inconsistent information about their online lead generation program.

What’s the prescription?

The only remedy at this point would be to focus on spending on quality manpower. Competencies in the field of B2B digital marketing are as good as having up-to-date marketing systems. Moreover, employing the services of a proficient B2B outsourcing company can also be a practical option, especially when you want to handle different audience interaction channels simultaneously.

A decade ago, when people search for companies and names on Google (or Yahoo!, if that was your thing), the first search results page would usually show a bunch of corporate websites, its affiliates, and maybe a Manta.com profile.

Today, aside from those things, the sites that will most likely return after a search would be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ profiles. Social media has become an integral part of everyone’s online experience, which used to be somewhat intrinsically suited for private networking, but is now conquering the business sector as well.

Hence, if your business has these social media accounts, you might as well make use of it in a way that it strengthens your online presence, which will eventually lead to more lead opportunities. Here’s how:

Be discerning. Combine your original point of view with curated postings from other respected sources in your industry. Don’t bombard your audience, but be creative and post at regular intervals.

Be engaging. Make it a rule to be accessible to your audience. Interact with them and have real conversations — don’t just post your news of the day.

Find your niche. You can be a generalist as it pertains to your company and post about anything and everything. Better still, find a specific topic that resonates and focus on that. Own a subject and work to become a go-to source.

A lot of businesses today are getting into Google+, but are they really realizing its maximum potential as a lead generation tool?

Google has bestowed a gift to the marketing community in the form of its highly efficient social networking and content platform. In fact, it is so multi-functional that marketers, even after quite some time, are still discovering new ways to utilize Google+ in any business-productive means they could find.

In an article posted on his website, Marvin Shervington, business consultant and marketing psychologist, shares a whole new method of using Google+ which he calls Circlecentric Marketing. The principle primarily revolves around moving the relationships a company or brand has with their fans/existing customers toward the centre of nested, or concentric, circles.

Similar to movement down a sales funnel, through every interaction, people can be moved from an outer circle toward an inner circle, hence deepening the psychological relationship and in essence moving them to a point where there can be a ‘sales conversation’.

According to Shervington, there are five ‘levels’ of Circles:

Circle 1 – outer circle

This happens when the ‘follow’ button is pressed, and means people have put you into their circles and will receive content in their stream.

Circle 2

Once someone ‘follows’, the brand can also see who has circled them and can then circle back – in turn, they will see they’ve been circled. They can also research on the person’s profile to see what other circles to add them to as well. If for instance someone was key target audience, then adding them to a circle where one can communicate more intimately may be an appropriate next step.

Circles 3 a/b/c

Here we’re categorizing the different nature of interactions for different people. Using circle management techniques, a person can be made to feel more and more listened to e.g. +1ing their posts a) every time they post (have them on notify) b) daily c) weekly etc

So instead of just expecting people to relate and engage with your content, you step outside of that to engage on their content. Pay special attention to your active engagers and return the favor.

Circle 4

Private community – this content is not seen on the web, and can lead to an increased level of intimacy. This could be a small, select group of people that you engage with at the high e.g. private posts, increased one-to-one engagement and exclusive offers etc.

Circle 5 – Inner Circle

Either form of community could have an inner circle where the individual can be invited to events, including hangouts and hangouts-on-air. The value of this is huge.

If you are a business, wouldn’t you like to get face-to-face with your customers for 30 minutes?
The nature of the Inner Circle will be determined by your business, but ultimately, this is where the magic really happens.

Vivien Reyeshttps://www.callboxinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/callbox-logo.pngVivien Reyes2014-01-08 00:40:402015-02-10 02:13:06Making the most out of Google + Circles: A Key to Effective Marketing

He may be just a work of fiction, but the cultural and forensic influence of Sherlock Holmes is bigger than Big Ben itself. His eccentric personality and game-changing methods of detection has animated the imaginations of mystery-solving enthusiasts for more than a century now, continuing to relive his legacy in all forms of media including theater, television, radio, comic books, and more recently, on the big screen.

Holmes is the personification of logical thinking. His theories apply to almost anything we do in our daily lives, and they have been a yardstick for personal and social discoveries made through organizing one’s line of thought.

“I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?”he once said.

There’s no better way of understanding your audience in social media marketing than to employ the services of the great Sherlock Holmes:

1. Be scientific.“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I cannot make bricks without clay.”Social media marketing is not like talking to people in the flesh. You don’t get to see people’s reactions or listen to them express their sentiments. Mostly what you deal with are online behavioral responses – typically in the form of numbers and other statistical data. These are stuff that your audience doesn’t directly give to you; rather you have to extract them yourself. To do this, you need to have a system that can convert their responses into something that you could measure and use. It’s disreputable to assume things without the proof of data. As Sherlock once put it, “I never guess. It is a shocking habit —destructive to the logical faculty.”

2. Pay attention to small details.
‘It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.’ Holmes can immediately tell where you’ve been or what you do for a living, without you uttering even a single word, by just looking at certain parts of your skin or clothing. Being scientific doesn’t mean you only look at the big scores. Similarly, there are things in social media behavior that don’t need to be measured just to play a significant importance, like your choice of words, the colors in your website, or the length of your blog post. You’d be surprised to know how much impact these small details could cause.

3. Observe your surroundings.
“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” As marketers continue to scour the internet, they usually stumble upon things that they’ve never thought of putting to good use before. Sometimes they also see what other marketers are doing and they ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Every day, we see a lot of things but we never take time to find out how we can exploit them to our advantage. Sherlock clearly pointed out to Watson: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”

About Us

Founded in 2004, Callbox is the largest provider of Multi-Touch Multi-Channel Marketing solutions for businesses and organizations worldwide. Its core competencies include Lead Generation, Appointment Setting, Lead Nurturing and Database Services, delivered through its proprietary marketing automation platform, the Callbox Pipeline.

Callbox enables companies to gain a foothold in their priority markets by initiating conversations with prospects through the efficient and intelligent use of targeted touchpoints over six channels: voice, email, social, chat, website and mobile.